NVMe Drives in the OpenMetal XL v4 Server

Q: What NVMe drives does OpenMetal use in the XL v4 server?

The OpenMetal XL v4 ships four Micron 7500 MAX 6.4TB NVMe U.3 drives as data storage, providing 25.6TB of raw NVMe per server with 1.1 million random read IOPS per drive and a sub-1ms 6-nines QoS guarantee.

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Each Micron 7500 MAX delivers 7,000 MB/s sequential read and 5,900 MB/s sequential write throughput. Random write IOPS reach 400,000 per drive. The 6-nines QoS figure — sub-1ms latency at 99.9999% for 4KB random reads up to queue depth 128 — means database operations, container storage volumes, and I/O-intensive VM workloads are not affected by latency outliers under sustained load. Write latency at the 99th percentile measures 65 μs.

The drives are rated for 3 DWPD (drive writes per day) with a 35,040 TB total write endurance over a five-year warranty period. For workloads like database WAL logging, Ceph OSD journals, or high-write CI/CD artifact pipelines, the 3 DWPD rating provides substantial headroom before approaching endurance limits. At 19.2 TB/day of sustained writes, a single XL v4 would need to fill its entire 25.6TB NVMe pool more than once per day to reach that threshold.

OpenMetal separates the data drives from the OS path: two 960GB SATA drives in RAID 1 handle the boot volume, so the four Micron 7500 MAX units are dedicated entirely to workload storage. On decommission, data drives can be wiped independently of the boot partition — relevant for regulated workloads running under HIPAA or PCI DSS that require verifiable data destruction.